So, what is this blog about you ask? Good question. For many years I found blogs silly. Even the name "blog" is silly.
However in the recent years I have had more and more trouble keeping organized with my adventures through the FOSS community. Also I have
come to the realization that it is a disservice to the community to spend hours working around bugs or configuring a
software package and not spreading the learned info in some manner or another. My response to these issues is what you
now see before you. Enjoy!

The folks behind KDE Connect recently released a new version (1.10) for the Android client. However, if you are running an older desktop client (like 1.0.1 instead of the more recent 1.3.3), you'll notice you probably can't browse for files on the file system anymore on your Android phone.

Digging around on google for "kde connect can't browse device" only lead to people complaining about the issue, but no solutions. This was a bit of a head scratcher, but the logs did seem to give some info:

The curious part is the line 'Their offer: ssh-rsa'. And if you look, the actual sftp client was called with a forced 'HostKeyAlgorithms=ssh-dss' argument. No problem I thought, I'm sure that's configurable somewhere right? I dug but couldn't find anything. Finally, I downloaded the actual deb package straight from the repos and extracted it. After a quick grep, the only mention of "HostKeyAlgorithms" was hard coded in the binary library file kdeconnect_sftp.so. Well, maybe we can just hand edit that part of the binary? Normally, I'd try to find a fancy hex editor for this, but I was feeling lazy (and already pretty annoyed by this). So I opened kdeconnect_sftp.so in vim, searched for 'ssh-dss' and replaced it with 'ssh-rsa'.

Keeping my fingers crossed, I rebooted the machine (as I couldn't really find out how to kill the plasma session which had linked in the old unmodified binary), opened Dolphin (the default file browser for you non-KDE folks) and it connected right up to the phone!